Key Ideas
The peasant’s dream — a cow, the symbol of dignity and piety.
Debt as a lifelong prison — moneylenders, landlords, priests and officials.
The city and the village — a parallel plot among the urban elite.
The final godān — the ritual gift of a cow to a Brahmin at death, which Hori cannot afford.
Godān (“The Gift of a Cow”, 1936) is the last completed novel of Premchand and is widely regarded as the greatest novel in Hindi. It tells the story of Hori Mahato, a poor peasant farmer in the village of Belari in Awadh, his fierce, loyal wife Dhaniyā, and their son Gobar, against the background of colonial rural society: landlords, moneylenders, Brahmin priests, village elders and police.
Plot summary
Hori’s one desire is to own a cow — a symbol of prosperity, respectability and religious merit. He buys one on credit from the herdsman Bhola, but his jealous brother Hīrā poisons it and runs away; Hori, to protect his brother, lies to the police and has to bribe them, plunging deeper into debt. His son Gobar gets Bhola’s widowed daughter Jhuniyā pregnant and flees to the city in fear; Hori and Dhaniyā shelter her, and the village council (pañcāyat), dominated by the priest Dātādīn, the moneylender and others, fines Hori heavily for breaking caste rules. Through a series of debts, fines, bad harvests and exploitation by landlords, moneylenders and priests, Hori loses almost everything. Gobar returns from the city, changed and rebellious, and quarrels with his father’s submissiveness. To pay for his daughter’s marriage, Hori effectively sells her to an older man. Finally, exhausted, Hori labours on a road-building gang in the heat, suffers sunstroke and dies. At his death, the priest demands the ritual godān — the gift of a cow to a Brahmin, to ensure the dying man’s passage to heaven. Dhaniyā, who has nothing, places in the priest’s hand the twenty annas she earned that day from selling twine, and says: “Mahārāj, there is no cow in the house, no calf, no money. This is all there is; this is his godān.” She falls unconscious.
A parallel plot follows the urban elite — the landlord Rai Saheb, the philosopher Mehta, the doctor Malati — debating ideals of progress, marriage and service while the village suffers.
Significance
Godān is a panoramic picture of rural North India in the 1930s and a profound tragedy of the peasant who accepts his lot. Premchand neither romanticises the village nor blames the poor; he shows how debt, caste, religion and colonial economy combine to destroy a decent man. Its final scene is one of the most famous in Indian literature.
Curiosities
did you know?- Premchand completed it in the year of his death; it is considered the greatest novel of Hindi literature.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is Hori a victim, or complicit in his own suffering?
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